The airmen who pilot their frail craft over hill and valley, sea and land, across cloud and through fog and mist, are the privateers of modern times; but for them there can be no capture, no quarter: only victory or a thousand feet drop to the cruel earth below. Through their young veins must flow the blood of a Drake, of a Philip Sidney, of a Nelson. Theirs must be the courage of a conqueror, the heart of a lion, the nerve of a colossus.
No bounded ocean is their sea, but the infinity of space. The ship’s compass is their best friend; for they maneuver their craft like a ship at sea. Wind and weather affect them as they would a mariner. For rock, shoal, sandbank and channel there are the high hills, the tall factory stack, the church steeple, and the deep valley. Landmarks there are, but always below, not on either side. Railways, roads, rivers, fields, woods and hills form the color scheme of the surface of the earth, by which the air pilot steers a course.
This, the youngest and most important Service, is essentially one for the young man and of the young man: a Service the future of which is being steadily built up by the “muddied oafs and flanneled fools” of the playing-fields of the public schools of Great Britain.
Immediately after leaving school is the most perplexing period in a boy’s life. Not only for the boy himself, but for his parents, for then has to be considered his future career. What is the boy capable of? What are his own personal wishes? What profession is he best adapted for physically? It is indeed a momentous question.
It is worse than useless for the boy fond of good, wholesome, out-of-door exercises and games to be put into an office or to study for the Bar, or to mope his young life away pen-driving. And, on the other hand, it is a positive torture for the youth with distinct literary taste, or love of things scholastic, to take up a Commission in one of the Services, or to go in for farming or a similar profession.
Taking everything into consideration, at least eighty per cent. of boys may be grouped into the former class—that is to say, they wish to adopt a healthy, open-air profession; and for this type of youth nothing can be better, and nothing can offer greater inducements, than the profession of the airman. It is a calling that appeals irresistibly to a boy’s heart.
The best possible training for the pilot of the air are outdoor sports and games. Football, which teaches the boy to keep his head in all emergencies, to keep his feelings always well under control, and to learn to obey implicitly the discipline of the referee’s whistle will prove invaluable to him when learning to fly, when he will be subject to every kind and manner of unexpected and sudden mishap and accident.
Cricket will teach him patience, judgment—so invaluable when landing an aeroplane (which, incidentally, is by far the most difficult feat to accomplish in flying)—and a steady eye.
Swimming and running will develop those muscles of the back and thigh which are used extensively in the pilotage of the aeroplanes.
Again, the sensation of a horse jumping a hedge is exactly similar to that of an aeroplane just getting off from the ground. With ski-ing, on the other hand, there is the feeling—and, in fact, the action—of plunging desperately into what, at the first attempt, appears to be an interminable and awful space. This is exactly the feeling experienced by the novice in his first trip up aloft. There is a strong similarity to ski-ing at the moment that the nose of the machine is suddenly put down, and she commences to sink rapidly towards the earth.